Tragedy at Dieppe Read online

  McNaughton replied the following day confirming his consent for selecting 2nd Division and attached troops to participate in Rutter. He agreed to “keep in touch with this matter by establishing close liaison with you.” Lieutenant Colonel G.P. Henderson from First Canadian Army’s operations general staff, he added, was delegated “to maintain contact with whoever you may indicate. LCol Henderson will keep me informed, and if the situation at any time so requires, I will get into direct touch with you.”

  McNaughton said he had instructed Crerar “to keep me fully posted from his end and as a matter of information, it being understood that all executive action in connection with the preparations would continue to follow the chain of command: GHQ Home Forces—SECO [Montgomery’s command]—1 Cdn Corps—2 Cdn Div.” McNaughton closed by saying that Roberts, under Crerar, “has now been authorized to proceed with the preparation of plans.”28

  Little more than a week earlier, McNaughton had told Montgomery that if he approved of the plan, he would agree to commit Canadian troops. McNaughton now sidelined himself without any study of Rutter. In fact, the Canadians were now fully committed to executing the operation. Only the details remained to be worked out.

  Major General Roberts found Crerar’s invitation for a “chat” in London ill timed. He had taken command of 2nd Division on November 7, 1941, but only in an acting role. Roberts had replaced sixty-one-year-old Major General Victor Wentworth Odlum, a Boer War and Great War veteran, whose relief due to advanced age and apparent incompetence Montgomery had effected. Odlum was to have been replaced by Crerar, but then came the expansion of the Canadian corps into an army. So Roberts had remained at 2nd Division’s helm and been formally confirmed in his rank and position on April 6, 1942.

  In the intervening months, he had tried to meld 2nd Division into a crack fighting unit and was at the time of Crerar’s invitation engaged in weeding out brigade and battalion commanders that were too old, incompetent, or both. Their replacements were charged with conducting a similar sweeping out of company commanders and non-commissioned officers also too old or lacking as leaders. Roberts knew much work needed to be done before the division would be up to his admittedly demanding standard of competency.

  Ham Roberts, as he was known, was fifty. Tall, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, he looked every bit the soldier. He was blunt, serious, and a dedicated professional. As one observer put it, Roberts “refused to accept the excuse that a man’s best is good enough, believing implicitly that excellence was always possible.”29

  During the Great War, then lieutenant Roberts had won a Military Cross while serving in the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery at the Somme. In June 1940, Lieutenant Colonel Roberts landed in France at the head of 1st Canadian Field Regiment as part of an ad hoc and reconstituted British Expeditionary Force intended to shore up French resistance. It was an ill-conceived venture. The French Army was collapsing, and it became evident that the British and Canadian troops landed at Brest should be evacuated before the Germans overran them. By the morning of June 16, Roberts’s regiment was back in Brest, its twenty-four guns lined up on a congested quay for loading aboard a ship.

  The following day, the increasingly panicked British general organizing the evacuation ordered all equipment not already loaded destroyed. Only men were now to be boarded. Roberts was incensed. The situation was not so dire that the guns could not be saved. As an artilleryman, he saw abandoning the guns as a disgrace. Rushing to the British headquarters in central Brest, according to the regiment’s war diary, Roberts “fought hard for nearly two hours to save his guns.” Twice ordered to destroy them, he each time argued until the order was countermanded. Finally, at 1415 hours, Roberts was given permission to load as many guns as possible before a 1600 sailing. He dashed back to the quay, and the regiment began lifting the 24-pounders onto the deck of the steamer HMS Bellerophon. With thirty minutes to spare, all the guns were soon aboard, so Roberts gathered up a dozen Bofors anti-aircraft guns, seven predictors, three Bren carriers, and several technical vehicles belonging to other units and added them to the roster. He reluctantly acceded to abandoning the regiment’s tractors and ammunition limbers. At 1715 hours, Bellerophon and two other vessels sailed for Portsmouth. “Although there was evidently no enemy within 200 miles, the withdrawal was conducted as a rout,” the 1st Field Regiment war diary recorded.30 Roberts’s career had been advanced by the gun rescue. Within a month he was promoted to brigadier.

  Such rapid promotion was not unusual in the early war years. Inter-war cutbacks had ensured that the Canadian Army lacked the senior officer cadre required for the kind of major expansion undertaken between 1939 and 1941. Many captains and majors found themselves promoted at a dizzying rate. Experience was necessarily lacking. Roberts was but one case.

  But his promotion to major general concerned even a fellow artilleryman, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Todd, who commanded 2nd Division’s 4th Field Regiment. Todd was a friend and considered Roberts “a great soldier.” But he also worried that Roberts had “been a gunner all his life.” Even his “gunner friends... were slightly concerned as to his welfare in commanding an infantry division when he had no experience of infantry except in training camps.” Todd felt Roberts was consequently lacking in essential knowledge. Roberts had also never been on a staff course, so he had no background or experience to help him “understand what he was getting into.”31

  In London, Roberts found Crerar not at all in the mood for a simple “undisturbed chat.” Crerar abruptly informed Roberts “that as his division had not yet participated in active operations, although it had been overseas for nearly two years, [Crerar] had selected [it] to carry out the operation.” The division would be supported by a single 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade battalion.

  The outline plan, Crerar said, called for six infantry battalions, supported by one tank battalion, to carry out the raid. A proportion of engineers and specialized troops would be added during the detailed planning. Crerar assured Roberts that air “support was to be on a very large scale. Naval forces available were considered to be adequate. They included six ‘Hunt’ class destroyers with [4-inch] guns and the requisite number of landing craft.”

  Troops would be landed “on the flank beaches, and on the main beaches at Dieppe.” There would be “adequate measures to deal with the batteries on the extreme flanks. The military intention was to seize and hold the town and vicinity while certain demolition tasks were carried out, thereafter re-embarking and returning to England.”

  Roberts realized there “was much to be done. No raid on such a large scale had been planned before.”32 He was thinking about racing back to his headquarters to start work, when Crerar said a suite had been reserved for him at the Mayfair Hotel. Roberts was to remain there until summoned by either Montgomery or Mountbatten for a more detailed briefing. The suite had been booked under an assumed name. He was not to use the phone and was to avoid going out for fear of being trailed by German spies. Roberts was spirited to the Mayfair Hotel and left impatiently pacing the suite for several days while awaiting the summons from on high.33

  On May 8, he was temporarily released for a meeting with Montgomery at the War Office. Roberts was joined by his chief operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel C. Churchill “Church” Mann. Only now was Roberts shown a copy of the outline plan. When the meeting was over, Roberts returned to the Mayfair, while Mann reported to Combined Operations Headquarters. Here he was assigned a desk and told to collaborate with naval and air force planners on Operation Rutter’s detailed plan. It was made clear, however, that Mann “carried the main burden of detailed planning on behalf of... Roberts, the Military Force Commander.”34

  Tall and sparely built, Mann was just thirty-six but recognized in the Canadian Army as “a quick-witted, versatile staff officer, an artist in operational planning whose briefings were models of articulate simplicity.” Montgomery’s personal liaison officer, Major Gor
onwy Rees, thought Mann “a brilliant staff officer, but what was more exceptional was that his mind had a wild and incalculable originality, and his contempt for normal military codes and conventions was extreme.”

  Mann, however, lacked operational experience. His staff officer talents had led to a rapid rise within the senior wartime ranks. Yet more than to anybody else, it fell to Mann to nail down how the army side of the raid would be conducted. Having a desk at COHQ was not of great help, for “the throng of wild, unconventional young officers of all three services” there “could give little assistance, for the simple reason that to date raiding had been confined to small-scale personal sideshows, and nothing of the magnitude of Rutter had ever been attempted.”35

  Mann was undaunted. He noted “that the Outline Plan was no more than its name implied, and a great deal of planning yet remained to be done.” After an intense period of studying what plan there was, Mann focused especially on the proposal that the supporting tanks should be landed on the beach directly facing Dieppe. “Such a plan, on the face of it,” he wrote, “is almost a fantastic conception of the place most suited to land a strong force of AFV [Armoured Fighting Vehicles]. It is, however, well worth evaluating with an unbiased mind.”36

  4. Of Considerable Difficulty

  On the evening of May 8, Lieutenant Colonel Church Mann got down to a careful study of Operation Rutter’s outline plan. The opening paragraph set out the raid’s “object.” The first sentence read: “Intelligence reports indicate that Dieppe is not heavily defended and that the beaches in the vicinity are suitable for landing infantry and AFVs at some. It is also reported that there are 40 invasion barges in the harbour.”

  The raid’s objectives entailed “destruction of defences in the Dieppe area... installations at the aerodrome of Dieppe–St. Aubin, directly south of the town, and of RDF [radio direction finding, or radar] stations, power stations, dock and rail facilities and petrol dumps. It is also proposed to remove for our own use invasion barges believed to be in the harbour, to obtain secret documents from the Divisional Headquarters believed to exist at Arques-la-Bataille, and to capture prisoners.”

  To achieve these objectives it was “proposed to employ... a Naval Force including about six small destroyers of the ‘Hunt’ class, the shallow-draught gunboat ‘Locust,’ seven infantry landing ships, and a great number of small craft.” The Military Forces were to include “two infantry brigades with Engineers; up to a battalion of Army tanks and Airborne troops.” Air support was to “consist of five squadrons of support fighters, one squadron of fighter-bombers, and sufficient bombers to produce extensive bombardments on selected areas and targets, to provide carrying aircraft for parachutes and tugs for gliders if possible.” This meant “approximately 150 bomber sorties.”1

  By now the earlier sketchy intelligence on Dieppe and its surrounding topography had been significantly fleshed out. This was vital for Mann because, like most of the Canadians, he knew nothing about the town. It lay on the Normandy coast some sixty-seven miles from the port of Newhaven in Sussex. Before the war, cross-channel steamers had ferried British tourists over to play on the town’s beaches and gamble at the casino. Some called Dieppe the “poor man’s Monte Carlo,” for the beach was cobble rather than sand, and the casino was hardly grand. A 1928 Blue Guide to Normandy listed its population at 24,658 and declared it “a seaport, fishing harbour, and fashionable watering-place.”

  Dieppe lay at the mouth of the River Arques within a valley less than a thousand yards wide. The river mouth had been improved by construction of jetties and basins to create a harbour described as “commodious and deep.” Railway lines radiated from Dieppe outwards to Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris.

  The coastline consisted “in the main of steep cliffs generally un-scalable by landing parties. Immediately to the west of the town these reach a height of 91 metres, and there is a similar though less lofty headland to the east. Although the only really large gap in the cliff barrier is that at Dieppe itself, there is an accessible beach at Pourville, about 4,500 yards west of the harbour entrance, where the River Scie flows into the channel through a flat-bottomed valley similar to that of the Arques though not so broad. At Puits [actually Puys], about 2,000 yards east of the harbour entrance, there is a much narrower gap in the cliffs, occasioned by a gully which extends inland for about three miles in a generally easterly direction. In peacetime both Pourville and [Puys] are fashionable resorts, each possessing a number of hotels.”

  Dieppe was fronted seaside by a two-hundred-yard-wide promenade extending from the harbour entrance for almost a thousand yards to the western cliff face. A large white casino stood in the cliff’s shadow. Perched on a step about halfway up the cliff was an old castle. Roughly halfway between the casino and the harbour mouth was “a large tobacco factory” with two tall chimneys. The harbour curved around the eastern half of Dieppe and consisted of several basins. Photographs had revealed that one basin appeared to have been recently filled for conversion to a park, though most maps showed it as still being water. The Blue Guide described the existence of caves on the eastern headland next to the harbour and on the western headland above the casino. These “Goves or Gobes,” the guidebook claimed, were still “inhabited by a few survivors of the cave-dwelling age.” The town’s “fashionable hotels” were mostly on the Boulevard de Verdun, “which runs along the front of the town, and look out across the grassy Promenade and beach.”

  On the seaward edge of the promenade was “a wall which at most points rises not more than about two feet perpendicularly above the beach. The beach itself is composed of large ‘shingle,’ the stones being in some cases about the size of a man’s fist. It is rough and irregular in contour.”2

  Separating the hotels and boarding houses from the promenade was a 150-foot-wide stretch of lawns and gardens. A second broad boulevard—Maréchal Foch—followed the curve of the harbour, and Dieppe’s Old Town was contained between it and Boulevard de Verdun. Around the harbour’s other flanks and bordering the railway and highway running inland, a newer section of the town had developed. Several narrow lanes switched up the chalk cliffs on either side of the valley to gain the headlands above. The airport of St. Aubin lay about three miles inland.

  The assault plan was precisely as earlier set out by Montgomery. Two flank landings at Pourville and Puys would support the main frontal assault directly in front of Dieppe. Paratroops and glider-borne troops would land inland and farther out on the flanks to silence coastal gun batteries and create chaos. The main issue to Mann was the risky plan to land tanks in front of Dieppe. In pre-war years, Mann had been among a handful of Canadian officers studying the potential of mechanized warfare, so he was more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of tanks than most senior Canadian officers.3 Clearly there were problems with tanks “attacking the enemy frontally,” he wrote. Assuming the tanks could get off the beach, which he thought possible, there would be “the danger of failure to penetrate through Dieppe, after the heavy air bombardment” due to streets being blocked by rubble from destroyed buildings. Thinking about the layout of similar English coastal towns, however, Mann thought a similar attack stood good odds of success “providing the engineer tasks were suitably dealt with.” Mann was cheered by the intelligence that Dieppe’s garrison consisted of just two poor-quality infantry companies and some additional divisional troops.

  Lack of serious opposition might mitigate the fact that the coastal terrain favoured the defence. As the outline plan recognized, between “Berneval to the east and Quiberville to the west of Dieppe, a distance of 11 miles, the coast consists of high cliffs... The only considerable gap in the line of cliffs is that made by the valley of the River Arques at the mouth of which lies [Dieppe]. At the foot of the cliffs is a narrow strip of stone and boulders bordered by a fringe of rocks. The problem of landing on such a coast is, therefore, one of considerable difficulty.”4

  The difficulty of
terrain elsewhere, Mann decided, further suggested Dieppe as the best spot for putting tanks ashore. There were fewer disadvantages to a frontal assault, in Mann’s estimation, than advantages gained. Assuming the tanks landed successfully, they would be “in easy striking distance of the most appropriate objectives for their employment.” Their arrival would attain complete “surprise” and “have a terrific moral effect on both Germans and French.” They could easily support the infantry and engineers in this main assault. “Control and information,” he added, “will be from front to rear, and difficulties of coordination to surmount obstacles, and deal with resistance would be the more easily met.”

  Mann decided that the outline plan had “the advantage of simplicity.” It was also the best choice for using tanks in the withdrawal phase, as there would need to be a rearguard action inside Dieppe to protect the troops during the re-embarkation.

  He looked with scepticism upon the alternatives of landing the tanks at either Quiberville or Pourville. The rivers between Quiberville and Dieppe, he felt, would limit the tanks to operating between the rivers Scie and Arques. They would not be able to gain Dieppe itself in time to affect the raid there. At Pourville there was the problem that intelligence maintained the existence of only “one exit (a one way track).” Pourville, he decided, might be useful for landing later flights of tanks, but not for the initial landing.

  “In spite of an initial adverse reaction to the proposal to land AFV on Dieppe front,” Mann concluded, “it seems to have a reasonable prospect of success, and offers the best opportunity to exploit the characteristics of AFV in this operation. If AFV were omitted from the operation it could still be very useful, but the likelihood of success in regard to the destruction of the aerodrome would be greatly reduced. In regard to the withdrawal phase, a proportion of AFV as part of the rear-guard will materially strengthen the rear-guard at a time when enemy re-enforcements may be deploying for counter-attack with the object of preventing our withdrawal. I am in favour of adopting the outline plan.”5